Wait is over for Windows 10

Last Wednesaday was the big day, with millions upon millions of people around the world filled with anticipation.

The world waited and waited and waited. Quite a lot of people around the world are still waiting. Microsoft are releasing Windows 10 in waves. This is so they can control the amount of downloads from their servers at any one time, which is a sensible thing to do.

I waited with bated breath, as I had reserved the upgrade for two machines that would accept it. Only one of them has received the notification that the upgrade is ready. The other is still on tenterhooks.

So how has the upgrade gone for the machine that received it?

Twice in a row using the Windows update process, the install got stuck at 96 per cent while configuring settings. That wasted a good two hours and reverted back to the previous version of Windows. After the first failure I noticed the install needed to re-download again, which wasted time for no apparent reason. So for my third attempt, I visited http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10 and downloaded the install manually.

The third installation attempt failed at exactly the same point, so for my fourth attempt I chose to use the advanced options. This allows you to specify whether to keep apps, settings and files. I chose to keep files only.

Success! Well, partial success as the machine no longer recognized any network devices, which made it useless.

This was when I found the best part of the whole upgrade process which performed flawlessly. You have 30 days to revert back to your previous version of Windows. Which I did.

Now this is just my experience, so I created a poll on Google+ to get an idea of the success vs failure rate. Currently with 60 votes in there is a 28 per cent failure rate, which sounds pretty high to me.

Lastly, a security issue with Windows 10 has come to light, caused by a service called WiFi Sense. WiFi Sense shares your WiFi password with your Outlook, Skype and Facebook contacts. You can opt out, so you may want to go and do that right now.